ViSAS: Pilot study

A pilot study was performed in Manchester City Art gallery over two days in April. 27 members of staff and 38 members of the public viewed a slideshow of 12 paintings on a computer monitor. Each painting was viewed for 10s, during which time the participant’s eye movements were monitored and recorded.

Analysis of these data is time consuming, but initial results are interesting. While there do not appear to be major differences in the ways in which “experts” and “non-experts” viewed the paintings, there was a noticeable difference between how more or less abstract works were viewed.

In each of the two examples below, the first image has a heat map superimposed – this shows which areas of the image were looked at most: a red colour indicates that people spent a relatively long time looking at that location, a green colour less time, and clear indicates that an area was hardly looked at at all. The values are calculated from an average of all the gallery staff. The second image shows 4 example gaze plots. In this image each fixation is plotted; the size of the circle represents the length of the fixation, while the numbers show the sequence.

Example 1: Sir Gregory Page-Turner, by Pompeo Batoni, 1768

(a) Heatmap for Sir Gregory Page-Turner, by Pompeo Batoni.

(b) Gazeplot for Sir Gregory Page-Turner, by Pompeo Batoni.

Figure 1: Heatmap and Gazeplot for Sir Gregory Page-Turner, by Pompeo Batoni. For the portrait, viewers attention was drawn to approximately 7 regions of the image (face, hands, statue, bell, background building and sword).

Example 2: Release, by Mark Francis, 1994

(a) Heatmap for Release, by Mark Francis.

(b) Gazeplot for Release, by Mark Francis.

Figure 2: Heatmap and Gazeplot for Release, by Mark Francis. For the abstract painting, viewers attention was more evenly distributed, although on average the centre was looked at more than the edges.